


Dragon Dances

by devilinthedetails



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce, PIERCE Tamora - Works
Genre: Dragon Dances, Gen, New Year, Yanjing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28575993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Jia Jiu and the dragon dances of Yanjing.
Kudos: 3





	Dragon Dances

**Author's Note:**

> Recently, I've been interested in Yanjing and writing stories to sort of reshape, reform, and re-contextualize what we see of Yanjing in the books, so this story is sort of a product of that. There might be still more Yanjing stories to come if my muse can cooperate...

Dragon Dances

At the end of the two week festival that marked the lunar new year, all across Yanjing dragons danced in the streets and squares. In Jia Jiu’s home province of Guangnan in humid southeastern hinterlands, the dragons were built for sheer impressive size and strength, not for sinuous maneuverability.

All the women and girls in Jia Jiu’s village growing up had spent months helping to embroider the brightly colored red and gold cloth that covered the dragon’s bamboo frame. It was the men and boys of Jia Jiu’s village who were tasked with cutting the bamboo and carving it into the many jointed body of the dragon.

“The dragon never has more than fifteen joints,” Jia Jiu’s father explained to her once as they watched the dragon wind through the narrow village streets on the final day of the new year celebration. “The dragon would be too heavy and large to dance at all if it had more than fifteen joints.”

Jia Jiu had nodded and not mentioned had already enlightened her about the fifteen joint limit and more as they sat embroidering their section of the dragon cloth with her aunts and girl cousins.

“The dragon must have an odd number of joints,” her mother had told her as they made neat, carefully measured stitches across the soft in vivid shades of red and gold. “The odd number of joints is auspicious just like the dragon itself is a symbol of good fortune believed to bring wealth, wisdom, and power to the people when it dances for them at the new year. Yet we can never build a dragon with more than fifteen joints or else it would be unable to dance for us, so we limit our dragon to fifteen joints and assign the women of each clan to embroider the cloth for one joint.”

“That is how we do it in our little village, but how do they do it in large cities with more than fifteen clans?” Jia Jiu had asked because even as a little girl she’d had needle-bright, needle-quick, and needle-sharp for questioning.

“In the cities, they have women who are trained to make the most beautiful silk.” Her mother sighed almost wistfully as she imagined places of wonder she would never see. “The temples in the city hire such women to make the silk for their dragons. Their dragons are more gorgeous than the humble ones we can make in our village with our own clumsy hands calloused from work in the damp rice paddies.”

The dragons that danced through the village streets and clan courtyards every year were mesmerizing in their bright beauty to Jia Jiu, and one year, she had been moved to ask her tutor, Zhang Chao, about this on the first morning they resumed lessons after the two week new year holiday.

“When and why did the first dragon dances start in Yanjing?” she interrupted one of his long-winded histories of a battle from a civil war during the glorious second dynasty that had lasted centuries and given birth to many great scholars and poets. She was his only pupil now because she was the most promising one. The only one with a chance of passing the yinshi examinations administered every year in the Summer Capital of Yan to determine who were the most learned and talented mages worthy of serving the emperor and his government that Tutor Zhang had himself failed twice. The only one who might raise his own status if she succeeded where he had failed. The only one in the village whose education could profit or advance him. The only one with strong magic and a keen mind.

“During the third dynasty,” Tutor Zhang had answered, unfazed by the interruption. He was not a severe master and content to let their lessons flow as they willed like a twisting river current. “When dragon dances first began, they were part of sacred rites to worship ancestors or to pray for rain. It was only during the fifth and sixth dynasties that dragon dances came to be used in celebrations of the new year as symbols of good fortune…”

After that, he was off on a tangent describing in tremendous detail the evolution of the dragon dances over the dynasties that had ruled Yanjing until the present splendid Long Dynasty.

Perhaps it was Tutor Zhang’s propensity to be distracted from the flow of his lessons or maybe it was Tutor Zhang’s own private advice that prompted that prompted Jia Jiu’s father to cobble together the money to send her to an expensive school in Yan dedicated to preparing students to pass the yinshi exams.

Yan, the spectacular Summer Capital, was in northeastern Yanjing where the fierce winds swept crimson sand off the steppes in summer and frigid air and snow in winter. At the new year’s festival, the dragons that danced through the temple squares and the marketplaces were in the northern fashion, built for graceful movement, not size or strength.

Jia Jiu might have been disappointed about how much smaller the heads and bodies of the dragons snaking through Yan were than the ones she had grown up with in her small village in southeastern Yanjing if the paper from which the dragons were made weren’t so delicate and beautiful. If the dragons, dancing at night in the north rather than during the day as in the south, weren’t luminescent and lit by a hundred candles from within. If the paper wasn’t thin enough to let the gasping, marveling crowd see the flames. If the dragons didn’t look as if they were on fire.

Because the dragons did look as if they were on fire as they flew through the marketplaces and temple squares, Jia Jiu smiled and applauded until her hands were numb and thought she had never seen anything so magnificent. So glorious. So symbolic of the enduring wealth and power of Yanjing in this era of the Long Dynasty.


End file.
